In recent years, Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technologies have emerged as a fast-growing market. Among the various WLAN technologies, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard is the dominating technology and is frequently used for WLANs.
Devices within WLANs communicate wirelessly pursuant to the 802.11 standard with other devices within the WLAN to request, grant, provide, and/or receive access to network resources. However, wireless communication between a first set of devices may interfere with communication between another set of devices. In one example, a first set of devices communicating on a particular channel may cause interference for a second set of devices communicating on the same channel (or partially overlapping channels) if wireless signals, transmitted between devices in the first set of devices, reaches devices in the second set of devices.
Interference that affects wireless communication can come in many forms from sources operating in-band or out-of-band. There are different types of in-band and out-of band interference that may or may not be directly measurable at a narrow-band receiver. Interference may affect the ability of the network device to transmit and/or receive. In general, the receiver will be the most affected by out-of-band interference. Since transmit and receive paths are closely tied in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standards (e.g., every directed frame sequence transmission requires the reception of an ACK or Block ACK), it may be difficult to pinpoint the problem in some cases. The Transmit (Tx) will be affected in different ways depending whether or not the in-band interference can be measured by the network device. For example, in IEEE 802.11 standards, when the measured in-band interference strength exceeds the Energy Detect Threshold (EDT), the ability of the network device to transmit will be affected. If the in-band interference is not directly measurable, then the transmissions may be corrupted.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.